In the last ten years, three-dimensional (3D) printing is evolving from developing prototypes to end-user products, mass customization and production of complex parts. Commercial application of three-dimensional (3D) printing, especially 3D printing of plastic or polymer materials is getting more popular and common nowadays. Today, there are many plastic or polymer materials 3D printing tools available, for example the popular “Makerbot”, which extrudes polymers in a layer-by-layer fashion until a complex 3D product is completed.
However, application of 3D printing of foods or biological materials are not common, especially the application of precious biotic materials, which is rather an un-explored territory. Biotic material or biological derived material is material that originates from living organisms. Most such materials contain carbon and are capable of decay. Examples of biotic materials are wood, linoleum, straw, humus, manure, bark, cotton, spider silk, chitin, fibrin, bone and swiftlet edible bird nest.
The application of 3D printing of biotic products are much more complicated than typical plastic or polymer materials, each biotic material have their own unique and distinctive set of biological, physical and chemical properties, and each of these unique biotic materials needs a very specific set of 3D printing system and printing methodology to deliver a successful or a good quality and high yield printing results.
Some of biotic materials are very expensive materials, especially swiftlet's edible bird nest. Swiftlets are birds contained within the four genera Aerodramus, Hydrochous, Schoutedenapus and Collocalia. The genus Aerodramus is of special interest due to its use of echolocation and its intricately constructed saliva nests which in some species contain no other material such as feathers, moss or twigs. Aerodramus Fuciphagus is a small bird of the swift family which is found in South-east Asia.
The term “edible bird nest” used in this description includes bird nest made from regurgitated saliva of swiftlet. In particular, the edible bird nest that built by Aerodamus Fuciphagus swiftlet. A raw swiftlet edible bird nest comprising of dried saliva and/or dried saliva mixed with bird's feathers.
Swiftlet's edible bird nest or called “Yan Wo” is one of the very precious Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ingredients. This TCM ingredient is consumed by Chinese for health improvement purposes since hundred years ago. Traditionally, the said swiftlet edible bird nest is harvested from cave, then cleaned, shaped and dried. Normally, the dried edible bird nest or “Yan Wo” is double boiled with sugar water and consumed in a liquid or semi-liquid form.
Typically, raw swiftlet edible bird nest will be going thru a long and tedious water based cleaning processes, then follow by a series of slow and highly labour intensive moulding and drying processes to make them into many different shapes and sizes before they were sold to the consumers.
Generally, edible bird nest moulding or shaping process is a very time consuming process mainly due to the nature of the works, which the worker needs to manually arrange and match many long, short and tiny edible bird nest textures or straps before “beautifully” shaping them into a desired shape. Therefore, the said moulding or shaping process need a seasoned and very skilful worker to deliver a “beautifully” shaped edible bird nest.
In fact, three most important parameters determining edible bird nest products pricing are their shape, texture and size. The main objective of this invention is to overcome edible bird nest processing challenges to deliver the best shape, texture and size, particularly in improving the moulding, shaping and texture/straps arranging processes.